Nine and a Half
by AstroGirl
Summary: The Doctor's regeneration goes wrong. How wrong? Well, ths was written for a zombie themed ficathon... AU from the end of 'The Parting of the Ways.'


**Nine and a Half  
by AstroGirl**

"You were fantastic. And you know what? So was I."

And that was it. His exit line. The last words he'd ever say with these lips. He could feel it starting now in earnest, the familiar tingling in his cells. Except... it was different this time. Different even from the other times it had felt different. It was probably to be expected, what with all the vortex energy running around in his body, but still, it was a little worrying. He felt strange. He felt...

He felt nothing.

* * *

He awoke from blackness to Rose's distraught face staring down at him.

"Doctor! Oh, God, oh, thank God... I thought you were dead."

"I was," he said. "Don't worry. It should be all right now." Except that it didn't feel all right, and he couldn't quite put his finger on why. "How do I look?"

Rose let out a little sound that was simultaneously trying to be both a laugh and a sob. "Terrible. Like death warmed up. God, I really did think you were..."

"No, I mean... What do I look like?"

At her puzzled expression, he brought a hand up to touch his face. It still felt like his face. Same nose, same lips, same unfortunate ears. "I haven't changed!"

"You never do." Rose laughed, patting his shoulder. "You scared me to death. Now, you want to tell me what's goin' on? What happened? One minute I was in the TARDIS, on Earth, and I dunno, something happened. I don't really remember. Then I was here, and you were sayin' stuff about changin', and there were these lights, and you collapsed." Her words rolled over him, unheard. "Doctor? Why are you touching your face like that? Does it hurt?"

It didn't. It didn't hurt at all. There was none of the sensitivity of newly-regenerated cells, none of the normal post-regenerative tingling. He hadn't changed. Somehow, he didn't feel relieved.

Something was very, very wrong.

"Doctor?"

His fingers slid down his cheek, coming to rest on his too-familiar neck, feeling for a pulse. He didn't find one.

"Doctor?" Rose was looking increasingly worried. He knew how she felt. He sat upright, frantically tugging at his jumper and pushing his hand up under it to lie flat against his chest. Left. Right. Nothing. His hearts weren't beating.

"Rose? I think I'm still dead."

* * *

He'd had to explain about the vortex energy first, which was long and complicated, then he'd had to explain about regeneration, which was even longer and more complicated, mainly because Rose kept interrupting with incredulous questions. But that was all right, because it gave him more time to think of a way to explain the peculiar interaction of the two, not just to Rose, but to himself.

"All that energy sliding around disrupted the regeneration process somehow. Arrested it before it really got started. Right now, it must be the vortex energy itself keeping me alive. Well... animated, anyway. It's not really all that different from Artron energy-- the stuff that allows me to regenerate, makes me a Time Lord. They're related, sort of."

"This is insane," said Rose. "Absolutely, utterly insane. All right. How long is this vortex stuff going to keep you... animated... for?"

"Good question." He looked down at his hand, studying it carefully. It was going a bit grayish, which was disturbing, but he couldn't see any glow around it, and that was good. No glow meant no energy escaping, which meant it was all staying usefully locked up in his cells. "A long time I think. Years. Centuries, maybe. It's powerful stuff, vortex energy."

"All right, well, that gives us lots of time to figure out what to do." Rose looked at him thoughtfully. "What _do_ we do? How do we fix you?"

"Ah," he said. "Well, that might be a little tricky."

"You have no idea, do you?"

"Not as such, no."

Rose shook her head. "Completely and totally insane," she said, then laughed. "Well, as long as you're not goin' to want to eat my brain or something in the meantime."

"Of course not!" he said. "What a ridiculous thought. You humans and your silly stories. Brain-eating zombies and all. Complete rubbish!"

She patted his hand. "All right, all right. Didn't think you'd want to eat my brain anyway, inferior human that I am."

She laughed, and he laughed with her, but it didn't come easily. Because, now that she mentioned it... it was a disturbingly appetizing thought.

* * *

It was no good. The cravings just kept getting worse and worse. He'd be in the middle of saving someone's planet, and he'd suddenly be hit with these incredible fantasies about ripping their skull off. It was embarrassing. And Rose... Oh, Rose. He'd never felt like this before, this desire to touch her skin, to stroke her hair, to sink his teeth deep into her scalp.

He'd tried everything: meditation, mixing up Artificial Brain Substitute in the TARDIS kitchen, giving himself stern talkings-to. Nothing helped, and he could hardly go on hiding his efforts forever. Rose was already starting to look at him funny. Well, funnier.

It was time for drastic action. He stared at the double-pronged knife he'd picked up a while back in a kitchen supplies shop on Teranteous Beta. He'd used it to fight off an army of invading amphibians, so he figured it ought to be up to this job. The blades were nicely sharp and pointy, and, conveniently, spaced exactly as far apart as a Gallifreyan's hearts.

Suicide went against every impulse he'd ever had, but he was attempting to think of it as noble self-sacrifice, instead. If all went well, it'd only be temporary, anyway. Kick-start the regeneration process back into gear and come out of it with a new face and less of a desire to munch on cranial matter. If he was lucky.

"Right," he said. "Here goes nothin'." He closed his eyes tightly and plunged the knife into his chest.

Nothing happened.

Slowly, he opened one eye, then the other, and looked down. He wasn't regenerating. He was just standing there like an idiot with a great knife sticking out of him.

He sighed and pulled it out, wishing he'd thought to take his jumper off first. He'd liked that jumper, damn it.

* * *

"You know, Rose, it's interesting. Most myths and legends, no matter how wild and far out, have a teeny little kernel of truth. Take your zombie legends on Earth. Voodoo priests used to give people drugs that would simulate a state of walking death and make their victims highly susceptible to suggestion. Hence, stories about armies of mobile corpses doin' their masters' bidding. Now, the brain-eating, I always assumed that came from Hollywood. But, here's a funny thing. Seems if you have an actual animated corpse like, say, yours truly, the one thing that's still technically alive is the brain. The brain needs to maintain its synaptic activity, and, lacking a proper metabolism, the only way to do that is, basically, to steal it from someone else. Which leads to..."

No, that wouldn't do at all. Too breezy. Too much technobabble. And how could he possibly expect Rose to believe that load of tripe, when he wasn't even sure _he_ believed it?

He shook his head at his reflection and tried again. "You know, Rose, I'm sure you have the most lovely cerebellum..."

No, that wasn't what he'd meant to say at all! Aaargh. He closed his eyes for a moment and took a deep breath his dead lungs didn't actually need. All right, how about this: "Rose, listen to me. This is very serious. It's become too dangerous for you to stay here. _I'm_ dangerous to you. For your own sake, for my sake, you need to go. Don't ask questions. Just go."

Oh, yeah, like that would work. Come to think of it, that sort of thing was more or less what had got him into this mess in the first place. He supposed he _could_ just take her home, physically push her out of the TARDIS and leave her there, but he'd feel kind of awful about that. Besides, knowing Rose, she'd probably find the only person on Earth in 2005 with a time machine and track him down.

What else, what else? He needed to try thinking like a human... "Rose, I hate to have to say this, but I don't want you around any more. That's right. I'm dumping you. I'm all cold and dead, and my unbeating hearts feel nothing. It's not you, it's me. No, don't argue. Just go. Go on! You're dumped!" He pointed dramatically in the direction he imagined the TARDIS doors being as they talked, then looked back at his reflection.

He looked utterly ridiculous. He could practically hear Rose laughing at him.

He lowered his hand and gently banged his forehead against its mirror image in the glass. There really was nothing for it. They were _doomed_. He was going to end up eating Rose's brain, whether he liked it or not.

* * *

But, of course, he was still the Doctor, even if he was technically dead, and he didn't like to think of "doomed" as a word in his vocabulary. Certainly not as one that ever applied to _him_.

The distraction of his craving for brains made it hard to think -- or maybe it _was_ synaptic degradation caused by not eating a proper zombie diet -- but over the next few days he put a great deal of thought into things, not all of which involved how to avoid Rose without making her worry. And he kept coming back to the same thought.

What he needed was a deus ex machina. And, fortunately, he knew exactly where to get one.

Well... probably.

* * *

"Doctor?" Rose looked around the console room as she came in, but he didn't seem to be anywhere in sight. Which was strange, because she was positive she'd seen him heading this way not long ago. He was getting far too good at avoiding her, and she was bent on finding out why. "Doctor?"

At the sound of her voice, his image suddenly flickered into view. "Hello, Rose."

She stared at it. "Oh, you have got to be kidding me! _Again?_"

"Yeah, I know," it said. "Another hologram. Sorry about that. But if I told you ahead of time what I was going to do, I'm afraid you'd try to stop me. The thing is, Rose... I'm not the man I was. This bein' dead stuff, it comes with problems. I won't go into the details. Maybe you can imagine some of 'em. But I'm afraid -- I'm more than afraid, I'm _certain_ -- that if I let this go on much longer, I'd hurt you. I'd probably hurt a lot of people. And I can't have that. So I'm going to do the only thing I can think of to do. I'm going to open up the heart of the TARDIS. I'm going to open it up, and I'm going to look right into it. After all, it brought you back to me. It gave Margaret the Slitheen her second chance." His translucent figure patted the side of the TARDIS console. He must have been standing in this same spot when it was recorded. "She's capable of things even I don't understand."

The hologram's eyes looked down at the floor, then met hers, as if he'd known exactly where she'd be standing. "So. If all goes well, you should find me with a different face and two beating hearts. If all doesn't go well... Well, I don't know what might happen. But I've parked the TARDIS on Earth, in your own time, just in case. Whatever happens, keep yourself safe. That's the most important thing." He flashed his trademark ear-to-ear smile. "I'll see ya, Rose. I hope."

The image flickered again and died.

"I don't believe it!" Rose's fist came down on the console where the image had been. "Of all the stupid, _stupid--_!"

Something moved on the other side of the console. Something small, something she hadn't seen... She raced around the console so fast she nearly tripped on the empty pile of the Doctor's clothes. Her hand went to her lips and she bit back a sob. "Oh, no..."

Under the Doctor's jacket, something moved. With the utmost trepidation she reached out and twitched the garment aside, revealing...

"Oh my God, it's a _baby_!"

The infant was maybe nine or ten months, Rose thought. She wasn't very good at estimating; she hadn't had much experience with babies. He sat there, naked in the pile of the Doctor's clothing, blinking up at her with big, deep, strangely old-seeming eyes.

She couldn't quite believe she was saying it, but... "Doctor?"

He smiled. The same smile, stretching between the same ears, just on a tinier scale. Rose suddenly felt the need to sit down.

The baby made an interrogative noise, disentangled himself from his nest of fabric, and crawled into her lap. Hysterical, near-sobbing laughter was threatening to bubble up from somewhere deep inside her. "Oh, God, Doctor... Look what you _did_, you... you _idiot_! I swear, when you've grown up enough that it's not child abuse, I'm going to _kill_ you."

He just looked up at her with those big, sweet eyes. Aww, he _was_ kind of cute. She put her arms around him and held him close. There didn't seem to be a whole lot else to do.

Man, she really hoped Time Lords grew up fast.

* * *

He knew _something_ had happened, but he wasn't sure whether it was something good or something bad. He considered crying for a while, even though he wasn't really much given to crying -- at least, he didn't feel like he was -- but then the nice lady came and found him.

He liked her. She seemed familiar, like this place. And when he climbed into her lap, she held him and cuddled him and made him feel as if whatever maybe-bad thing had happened probably wasn't really very bad at all.

She hugged him closer, and he settled back into her arms. He was sure everything would be okay now. She would love him and feed him and--

"Hey! Quit chewing my hair!" She pulled away from him a little, but the yelling came with a laugh, so he knew she wasn't really angry. He caught another mouthful of hair, and she pulled her head back from him again so he couldn't reach her head at all.

He pouted, but he didn't cry. It was all right. Later, he'd have another chance to bite into her head and eat the yummy thing inside. And everything would be _fantastic_.


End file.
